The Puritan Devil

I think it was Graham Greene who described in a travel book an evening scene in an African village. The people have gone into the huts. Into the dusty, wind-swept alleys of the village the dancers emerge – swaying this way and that, higher than human beings in their conical grass skirts and head-gear, in a sense not human beings at all, since they represent ‘demonic’ forces. And when I say ‘demonic’, I am following in Greene’s track, who page 124 compared the dancing figures to the witches and ogres that appear in the fantasy life of young children, even if they have not read books about them. The point I would like to stress is that the dance is ultimately beneficial to the community. It is quite often the function of art to do this kind of thing. The individual dancer may be as much in a state of trepidation as the people inside the huts – when he puts on his ‘devil-gear’ he has put himself into a situation of danger – but again, the point is that his intention is not irresponsible – his temporary aim may seem to be to scare and shock others. But under the dramatic garment, he remains a human being, and his ultimate intention is a communal one.

You may imagine that no such rituals are present in civilised life. I think it would be naïve to suppose such a thing. The life of the modern bureaucracies is essentially Puritanical. I don’t think anyone who’d really thought about the matter could come to any other conclusion. We approach sex and death in a clinical way that regards such forces as ‘things’ – thus holding them at arm’s length – and thus, as it were, magically annihilating them. Fortunately the magic is unsuccessful. If it were successful we might cease to procreate and lose the instinct of self-preservation. But all that actually happens is that we develop split minds – one half, rational, clinical, polite, more or less humane – the other half, negative, unillumined, violent, a wilderness of primitive prejudices and phobias, waiting to be stirred into action by some politician who has an axe to grind. The ‘demonic’ element is not destroyed by Puritanism; it is only shoved further back into the mind. I am not talking through a hole in my neck. It is well worth considering how much the Nazi atrocities, engineered by quiet bureaucrats, and carried out by ‘good family men’, may have been an outbreak of ‘demonic’ attitudes which Puritanism has robbed those men of the power to analyse or understand.

As a believing Catholic, I feel obliged to make a clear distinction between the traditional Satan, the spirit who, we are told, tempted Christ in the wilderness, and the Puritan ‘Satan’ – an agglomeration of those sexual and aggressive impulses which the individual has been unable to cope with, and therefore shoved back into the subconscious mind. When, for example, a puritanical priest – we are never without them – picks up James Joyce’s Ulysses, and cries out: ‘I can see the Devil here! I can see his horns and his hoofs and his tail’ – (and, one should stress, his mythical phallus) – this poor man is actually doing no more than react to his own subconscious pressures. Part of his theology is personal fantasy. If there were in fact any diabolic activity in his neighbourhood, he would be unable to detect it, since his mind is clouded by a subjective and negative ‘demonism’ – and, to get nearer home (since Puritans can be found just as readily among people who accept no theological system at all; when, as I recently heard, somebody picked up the first issue of FALUS, and publicly burnt it, that person was performing a personal act of exorcism – getting rid of the puritan ‘Satan’ that had long been plaguing him or her, whether or not FALUS had ever been printed. But the puritan ‘Satan’, being part of the human mind, cannot ever be got rid of – he gains new force with every exorcistic act, till, in the most extreme cases, a point is reached where the person concerned dreads so much of human thought and feeling and activity that he or she can no longer function socially. This position of stalemate is remarkably common in our country. A great many of those who go regularly into our mental hospitals are not people who have been ‘living it up’ too much, or whose language is too coarse, or whose emotions are too uninhibited – no, they are polite, humane, Puritanical schoolteachers who have been doing the best they can under the Puritan emotional regime. In contrast, the anti-Puritan is of course a person who has been singed by the fires of the Puritan ‘Satan’ – and instead of running like mad, has had the courage to pull off the mask from that formidable figure and reveal what was there all the time – a tangle of nursery phobias – a ‘demonic’ not a diabolic entity. One would hope to cease to be anti-Puritan; to reach the point where one no longer cared a bugger who objected to the word ‘bugger’ – but this takes time, and you can’t expect it to happen automatically at a university level. A Puritan has to become an anti-Puritan before he can become merely normal – and in this the first step is always the hardest to take.

To my knowledge, there are a very limited number of ‘forbidden’ words in the English vernacular – ‘fuck, cunt, prick’ – which are exact sexual words – and then, somewhat less ‘forbidden’ – ‘shit, piss, arse’ – which are counted as vulgarities, because they refer to the excretory rather than the sexual functions. Then there is ‘cock’ as an alternative to ‘prick’ – and the rhythmical word ‘bugger’ which no longer refers to sodomy, but is, I think, now a kind of verbal blank for filling in gaps in conversation. Now one’s use of these words, or one’s view of the use of them by others, will depend very much on one’s view of the ‘demonic’ area of the mind. I do not regard with equanimity a situation by which I, or anyone else, have to live always with a split mind, the intellectual faculty being conscious, and the faculties that are nearer to a biological level being shoved always into subconscious exile. I couldn’t write a line of good verse if this were the way I habitually thought and felt. It only occasionally happens that I have to introduce the ‘demonic’ words into a poem – usually it is to express a satirical or nihilist element in the poem concerned, as in one I recently wrote about a war hero:

You’re out of touch, mate – no gear to fiddle –
Nobody to fuck, punch, kick a ball at –
All that self-loving vigour
Swallowed up in Caesar’s black mad eye

That imitates Zeus! . . . (‘At the Grave of a War Hero’, CP 363)

page 126

Now, I will always demand from the community the literary right to use the ‘demonic’ words and incorporate ‘demonic’ elements in works of art. Why, after all, should I be governed by someone else’s ‘Satan’ – especially when I have a quite different one of my own – the one the Church proposes to me, who has no phallus and is a mighty hard man to tangle with? When I saw the first issue of FALUS I thought, ‘Good! At last there is a sign of literary activity in this university – and naturally enough, these blokes have taken the Puritan’s Devil by the horns. . . .’ If one is ever to cut the leading-strings of the nursery, surely the university is the place to do it.

In dealing with the Puritan’s ‘Satan’, there are really only two alternatives – either to be devoured by him and become a sad civil bureaucrat – or to eat him, chew him up, horns and tail and all, and swallow him down, and assimilate him as a part of one’s own personality. That’s more or less what every ordinary psychiatrist recommends. There’s one problem, though. Women are particularly prone to live in great fear of the Puritan’s ‘Satan’ – after all, more than anything else, he is an old fertility god in a new guise. If it was a woman who burnt the copy of FALUS, her subconscious motivation was clear enough – it was a magical act to prevent her ever getting pregnant.

A long time ago, in another university, a student group printed a newspaper which leanedheavily tothe Left. The varsity authorities (it was, if I remember rightly, the College Council) banned the paper. As a result, the students shifted the printing press off the premises; and the only undoubted literary renaissance this country has ever known was under way. The point that really annoyed and frightened the College Council was not Leftism – that view, being political, can also be clinical and Puritanic – it was that someone had written an article on the sex-life of students, and said justly enough that masturbation was their main stand-by.

I may say that it depressed me greatly to see student authorities trying to ban or change FALUS. Surely they could leave that kind of police work to the non-student authorities. The people who are producing FALUS will win anyway; because they are getting their own minds into normal working order. But what will the ones who tried to sit on them be like in ten years’ time? Poor bloody fossilised bureaucrats, male and female, toeing the line for promotion and sitting up like begging dogs for food from the master’s hand! And wondering why their lives are a kind of dead Void. You meet them every day of the week – and they’re not a pretty sight. The absolute social sedatives don’t stop them from suffering either – they know in their heart of hearts that they’ve been well fucked, buggered, demolished, by an excessive fear of freedom and an excessive love of authority. God help them!

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